Magno Girl is a novel by Joe Canzano.
Finished on: 14.6.2015
[I got this book in an Librarything giveaway in exchange for my review.]

Plot:
Ron just started dating Magno Girl who is trying to make it in a world full of superheroes. Superheroes who are apparently more interested in merchandising opportunities and advertising than saving people. Magno Girl – superpower: the Gaze of Guilt, guaranteed to make everybody break down, confess and consider their life choices – doesn’t want to fall into the same trap. When a pizza baker is found dead, Magno Girl enlists Ron’s help in the investigation that she suspects is part of a bigger plot.

Magno Girl is a book that tries very hard to be funny. Sometimes that even works out, but mostly it became a little too crazy and random for my taste.

At times the style of the book reminded me of Jasper Fforde. Only that with Fforde, every detail, even if it’s completely crazy, ties into a well thought out plot and world structure. In the case of Magno Girl, things just happen because they’re funny or weird or because they can happen. I would have appreciated a little less whimsy and a little clearer structures in the world.

That doesn’t mean that I didn’t see the humor in any of it. Sometimes he really hits his mark:

Of course, I’d studied the art of sneaking. It mostly involved being quiet. It also involved staying low to the ground and avoiding that big pile of hubcaps.
Bong! Crash! Clank! What a crazy place for those hubcaps to be.

or

I knew that patience was a virtue — but I still liked to shoot first, ask no questions, and then shoot again, because that’s what usually works.

or

This was the worst defeat I’d suffered since that drunken night in Atlantic City where I’d lost $4,000 playing the parking meters.

But more often than not I was just hoping that things would get dialled down a notch or five. The pacing and the general writing style are breathless all the time with five different weird things happening at once, meaning that it lacks those breaks in story telling that are necessary to really realize what you’re reading and what is going on. Good pacing doesn’t mean fast all the time. It means knowing when to be fast and when to be slow.

Apart from the pacing, another weakness of the book lay in Ron as the narrator. For one, I thought he was pretty annoying (and he laughed all the time. Seriously, I don’t know how often “I laughed” was written in this book, but it was definitely too much). But the other thing was: I wasn’t interested in Ron and Ron’s point of view. The book is about Magno Girl and I wanted to hear directly from her. Plus, Ron is a narrator who constantly points things out instead of showing them to us.

All in all, Magno Girl had its enjoyable moments but could have done with a couple of more rounds of editing to really round it off. Personally I probably won’t be looking for a continuation of the series.

Summarizing: Okay.